In 2005, armed with two years of college Arabic and a vague
employment contract, I tumbled out of a taxi and onto the main
street of Ramallah, Palestine. The region was anything but stable.
Six months after my arrival, Hamas won its first elections and came
to rule the West Bank; roughly 18 months after that, the party was
ousted in a series of bloody clashes and retreated to Gaza.
Meanwhile, the Israeli military occupation of both areas continued
unchecked, as it had for close to 40 years.

Against this backdrop, my employer, a U.S.-based aid agency, was
focused on a unique set of priorities: holding focus groups with
young Palestinians to hear their views on youth economic
opportunity and entrepreneurship, and to ask what we (as
international interlopers) could do to help boost economic growth
in the country. While we moved from town to town, chatting with
group after group of earnest youth, two things happened. First, I
got bored by the two-hour meetings. Second, I noticed that everyone
everywhere had a cell phone and that they were using them
constantly to send text messages to each other—hardly an
earth-shattering observation in 2013. However, close to 10 years
ago, only half the population in my own home country, Canada, owned
a cell phone, and at the time most people didn't see it as a vital
device.

As the weeks passed, my frustration with the tried-and-true
focus group approach mounted. At first I was too timid to speak out
(this was, more or less, the first real job I'd ever held and I
considered myself lucky to have it). Ultimately, though, I ended up
spending any spare moment I could sketching out text-message
sequences with some friends. As we started to build a team and a
concept, we mustered up the courage to leave our day jobs and focus
on the idea full time. And while some criticized us for "having it
too easy" or "having all the luck in the world" by being able to
work on our own clock without a boss or a 9-to-5 schedule, we were
simply thankful to have a window of uninterrupted time to try out
something new. Unbeknownst to us, we were about to come up with a
mobile solution that would help thousands of people find work more
easily: linking job seekers with local employers via text
message.

Fast-forward seven years, and Souktel—as our mobile job service
came to be known—has been fortunate to help youth in 21 countries,
to be profiled in the Wall Street Journal , and to raise
venture funding from a group of investors that includes household
names like Google and Cisco. Through a process that's low-cost and
easy to understand, the service has allowed thousands of
job-seekers with basic cell phones to create text-, audio-, or
web-based "mini-CVs"—with information about their skills and work
experience. These profiles are then auto-matched with jobs that are
listed by employers through a similar process, and both sets of
users get SMS alerts with the other's contact details. Now that
we've reached scale, we frequently are asked the same question by
aspiring startups and high-level decisionmakers: What's the secret
to building a successful youth enterprise?

Naturally there's no simple answer, but I usually respond the
same way each time I'm asked: from our experience, as a group of
Palestinians, Canadians, and Americans, we've achieved success by
taking the very concepts that often are used to define youth
negatively—especially in the Arab world—and inverting them to
achieve positive aims. To be specific, we believe that the path to
successful youth entrepreneurship is defined by three key factors:
frustration, fearlessness, and fortune—and by "fortune," I mean
luck; the money, if it comes, is seldom in the picture at the
beginning.

Young entrepreneurs are frustrated. We're never content with the
status quo and are always seeking to combat what we see as
inefficiencies in the world around us: Why should I call several
taxi companies to hail a cab when a single...

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